Some embodiments described herein relate generally to control plane protocols for Fibre Channel (FC) networks, and, in particular, to methods and apparatus for providing a unified control plane protocol for converged FC networks.
In some known FC networks, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is implemented to provide a converged input/output (I/O) mechanism to carry both Internet protocol (IP) traffic and FC traffic within data planes of Ethernet networks. In FCoE, however, a separate set of control plane protocols are typically used to perform routing and to distribute databases in IP and FC networks. In such known FC networks, multiple techniques of the FC protocol can be used to distribute control information to multiple FC switches. The use of the multiple techniques of the FC protocol, however, typically results in higher network management operational expenses.
In some other known FC networks, the Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) protocol is used to support FC over IP networks. An iSNS server, however, is typically more suited to a centralized implementation than to scale effectively to the size of data-center networks.
Accordingly, a need exists for a decentralized solution to unify control plane protocols for FC and Ethernet/IP networks, thus to decrease the network management operational expenses.